[WikiEN-l] deletionism in popular culture

[Ryan Delaney]

On Wed, Nov 4, 2009 at 3:07 AM, Charles Matthews <
charles.r.matthews at ntlworld.com> wrote:

> Ian Woollard wrote:
> > Yes, but some of those really bad articles will become good articles
> > if you spend enough time on them.
> >
> > Deletion short-circuits that.
> >
> > In a perfect world, with perfect AFDs it wouldn't matter. In the real
> > world, with real world AFDs it does.
> >
> Yes, but (I say) the solution to that is not to keep all deleted
> material forever on the site. There are clearly people who feel that
> this _is_ the solution, but I'm not one of them. It may be a weakness of
> AfD that deletions do occur, not because the topic is unsuitable for the
> encyclopedia (which, let us not  forget, remains the main reason for
> deleting an article), but because the article is not in great shape. But
> the way to fix up that weakness is not permanent public storage of stuff
> that really is mostly junk.
>
>
I agree that keeping bad content on the site is not a good idea. Thankfully,
PWD doesn't require that. PWD doesn't mean "don't ever delete anything". (If
anything, it makes it easier to delete things that unambiguously need to go
away.) What it does do is:

(A) Makes deleted content available to non-admins, which is good because it
gives us more eyes reviewing the propriety of deleted articles;
(B) Removes the necessity to panic about being perfect at AFD and CSD
because erroneous deletions are easily subjected to peer review and
reversed, which should go a long way to reduce the instruction creep and
policy wonkery at both of the aforementioned pages (which is already well
beyond intolerable levels) ;
(C) a bunch of other stuff you can read about on the PWD proposal page.

The fundamental question that must be answered by critics of PWD is why
deletion should be treated as a special category of editorial decision
making. (I don't believe this question was ever answered when VFD was
formed, but I'd love to do a historical study of how deletion process
developed.) Consider that we don't require that an ad-hoc committee meet
every time we make another unambiguous edit to an article-- we rely on
discussion, consensus building, and dispute resolution. Nobody objects to
this when it comes to every other kind of edit on Wikipedia, but for some
mysterious reason, when it comes to deletion some people think the Wiki
model is inappropriate. We disagree. Just like we purge bad, poorly written,
poorly sourced content from articles by editing them, we can purge bad
articles from the Wiki in exactly the same way. That's why we call it "Pure
Wiki" deletion -- we believe the wiki model that has served us so well for
content creation can serve us just as well for content removal and cleanup.
That shouldn't be controversial or counter-intuitive: the massive success of
the Wiki model in every other area should give us good reason to expect it
to work here, too.

- causa sui